For the Lord will not cast off forever, but, though he cause grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love.
"Though he cause grief." Not every honest account of God skips past the hard parts. This verse doesn't say pain is an illusion or that suffering means God has stepped away — it holds both things at once: grief that's real, and compassion that's just as real, coming from the same source.
That might be closer to your actual experience than either extreme you've been offered — the version of faith that promises nothing will ever hurt, or the version of doubt that assumes a good God and a hard life can't coexist. This verse doesn't resolve that tension by pretending it isn't there. It just insists compassion has the last word, not the grief.
You don't need a tidy explanation for the hard season you're in to consider this. You just need to be willing to imagine that whatever is happening to you isn't the whole story — that there's more compassion coming than you can currently see.
If you've assumed a good God couldn't coexist with a hard life, that assumption is worth questioning before you settle it either way.
A short video on this is coming soon — for now, read on.